Arnold J. Toynbee combined deep insight into Civilizational History,
with propaganda for the One-World goals of Cecil Rhodes' Round Table group,
officially known as the Royal Institute of International Affairs (the CFR
being its affiliate in the United States).

Carroll Quigley on the Round Table and Toynbee's place in it: quigley.html.

(1) Toynbee on Trotsky and the Bolshevik Revolution

(1) Toynbee on Trotsky and the Bolshevik Revolution

{p. ii} The Royal Institute of International Affairs is an unofficial
body which promotes the scientific study of international questions and
does not express opinions of its own. The opinions expressed in this publication
are the responsibility of the author.

{p. iii} The Impact of the Russian Revolution 1917-1967:
The Influence of Bolshevism on the World outside Russia

With an introductory essay by Arnold J. Toynbee

Issued under the auspices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO

1967

{p. vi} Note on Contributors

ARNOLD J. TOYNBEE, whose best-known work is A Study of History,
was Stevenson Professor of International Relations in the University of
London and Director of Studies at the Royal Institute of International
Affairs from 1925 to 1955. ...

{p. vii} Looking Back Fifty Years

ARNOLD J. TOYNBEE

REVOLUTIONS, like wars, are abnormal disturbances of the course of life;
and, being abnormal, they are bound to be temporary. Officially, a country
may be in a permanent state of revolution. This is the official doctrine
in present-day Mexico; yet the Mexico of 1967 is not, in truth, the revolutionary
country that Mexico was during the fifteen or twenty years immediately
following the outbreak of revolution there in 1910. Every revolution
has its trajectory. The shape and the length of the curve will be different
in different cases. Yet it does seem to be a general rule that, sooner
or later, every revolution eventually comes to rest. The seventeenth-century
revolution in England took eighteen years to move from the outbreak of
the Civil War in 1642 to the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. The eighteenth-century
revolution in France took twenty-five years, 1789-1814, to run its corresponding
course. The communist revolution in Yugoslavia took twenty-one years, 1945-1966,
to reach the point at which the Communist Party and its executive organs
relinquished their revolutionary monopoly of power.

The revolution that broke out in China in 1911 has had a more complicated
history. The overthrow of the Manchu dynasty was a normal event in Chinese
history. For two thousand years past, dynasties had repeatedly been
overthrown when they had been deemed by the Chinese public to have 'exhausted
their mandate from Heaven'. The new element in the Chinese revolution
of 1911 was that the deposed dynasty was replaced, not by a new dynasty,
but by an exotic regime inspired by the western ideology of liberal democracy.
This new fact put this twentieth-century Chinese revolution into the same
category as the English and French revolutions, or the abortive liberal
democratic revolution in Russia in 1917. This first Russian Revolution
was, of course, rapidly followed by the Bolshevik Revolution of the same
year; and in China, as in Russia, what seemed at one time to have been
the beginnings of a liberal democratic westernizing revolution, misfired,
to be followed after decades of ruinous turmoil by the triumph of a
rival western ideology,

{p. 2}

communism, which has now been in power for eighteen years. The
upheavals and civil wars which began in 1911 with the downfall of the Manchu
dynasty, and to which were added intermittent hostilities with Japan, lasted
nearly forty years; in Russia only a few months elapsed between the fall
of the Tsar and the establishment of the Soviet regime.

By comparison with the course of the Chinese revolution, the course
of the Russian Revolution is fairly clear. Here the experiment in liberal
democracy was so short-lived that it can be almost ignored. Its successor,
the Bolshevik Revolution, that trod closely on the liberal revolution's
heels, is the event that counts, and, by this year 1967, half a century
has elapsed since its outbreak. How are we to size up the situation in
the Soviet Union today, fifty years after ? In Russia, as in Mexico,
the revolution has obviously shed much of its initial demonic violence.
The storm has abated, but can we be sure that it is over? Is there no possibility
that it might break out again? These questions need close and earnest consideration.
The answers, whatever these may prove to be, are going to affect the course
of history, not just in the Soviet Union, but all over the world.

When we are trying to answer these questions in the Russian case, in
which the revolution is still current history, it may be helpful to look
back on the histories of previous revolutions which, by now, have completed
their course. In the light of these previous cases we can perhaps venture
on two generalizations. On the one hand, every revolution does change
things irreversibly, as every revolution claims to have done. On the
other hand, no revolution ever succeeds in making the complete break
with the past that every revolution also claims to have made. The irreversibility
of a revolution asserts itself if an attempt is made at an integral restoration
of the pre-revolutionary state of affairs. When Humpty-Dumpty has had a
great fall, all the king's horses and all the king's men cannot put him
back again securely in his previous position. They can merely condemn him
to suffer a second fall. The Restoration lasted only twenty-eight years
in England, and no more than fifteen years in France. In each case it provoked
a fresh outbreak of revolution - indeed, a series of fresh outbreaks in
the French case. A revolution is a way of bringing about changes that have
become imperative, and it will continue to erupt until its work has been
completed. At the same time, it is an illusion to imagine that a revolution
can create an entirely new Heaven and new Earth. It is notorious, for example,
that the ultimate

{p. 3} effect of the French Revolution in the field of administration
was to give practical effect, in a more systematic form, to the ideas that
were latent in the Ancien Regime which the Revolution claimed to have swept
away.

These generalizations from past experience may throw some light on the
Russian Revolution's probable future course. The founding fathers of the
Soviet Union claimed to have abolished Tsarism and capitalism within the
Soviet Union's frontiers. Beyond that, they claimed that communism was
an ideology that had a unique capacity for unifying mankind. On
a world-wide scale, so the Bolsheviks claimed, communism was destined
to overcome the vicious traditional divisions between classes, nations,
and races (it would overcome the divisions between religions by
extinguishing the religions themselves). In making these claims - and
they made them with the confidence of sincere conviction - Lenin and his
companions were launching a myth that was potent, exhilarating, and infectious.
Today, fifty years after, it is already clear that these overweening claims
are not going to be made good. Yet, just because the passage of half a
century has now given us this hindsight, it has become difficult for us
to recapture mentally the atmosphere of the immediate reactions, abroad,
to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 in Russia.

The immediate repercussions were dynamic, and this, above all, in Europe.
Already, before the end of the First World War, Europe had become receptive
soil for the sowing of Lenin's dragons'-tooth seed; and, in central
and eastern Europe, the defeat of the two Central Powers, and the simultaneous
dissolution of one of the two, Austria-Hungary, carried the wartime agony
to a climax. Here, next door to Russia, people's minds were now deeply
unsettled and confused. The despair into which they had been plunged
by terrible experiences was being compensated psychologically by wild
hopes for the advent of a secularized version of the millennium. At
the turn of the year 1918-19 the Spartacists - the core of the newly-founded
German Communist Party - made a desperate attempt at revolution. In
1919 two Central European countries, Hungary and Bavaria, became
'Soviet Republics' on the Russian model; and, though these two regimes
were shortlived, the destiny of all Europe still seemed to remain in
the balance till the defeat of the Red Army before Warsaw in summer 1920
and the failure of the 'March action' in 1921, when the German communists
made another attempt, doomed from the outset, to capture power. Till then,
it seemed on the cards that

{p. 4} Europe, at any rate east of the Rhine, might go communist
en bloc, and if this possibility had become a reality, the consequences
would have been momentous, not only for Europe, but for the whole world.
The statesmen assembled at Versailles debating the expediency of intervention,
were not immune from these anxieties. Far from it. Their fears matched
in reverse the hopes of the Bolsheviks. Colonel House wrote in his diary
that 'Bolshevism is gaining ground everywhere'; Lloyd George saw Europe
'filled with the spirit of revolution'.

{excursus

Toynbee seems to misrepresent Lloyd-George and House.

House and Jacob Schiff were key players behind the scenes in setting
the agenda for the Treaty of Versailles, in which the League of Nations
would (hopefully) be a World Government: house-schiff.html.

Lloyd-George and House wanted to bring the Bolsheviks into the Peace
Conference at Versailles.

At the time, Henry Wickham Steed was editor of The Times, owned
by Lord Northcliffe. He wrote, inhis book Through Thirty Years
1892-1922: A Personal Narrative Volume II (London, William Heinemann
Ltd, 1924):

{p. 270} The first bad blunder was made on January 22nd when
Mr. Lloyd George suddenly proposed that Bolshevist delegates should
be invited to Paris. A similar suggestion had been made by a Jewish
writer ten days before in the Manchester Guardian. The notion was
that the Bolshevists and the Russian border peoples whom they were striving
to destroy should cease fighting and meet in Paris alongside of
the Peace Conference; but its practical effect would have been to accredit
Bolshevism and to stimulate its growth in Central Europe. ...

{p. 271} The Bolshevists refused to cease fighting and the various
governments established on the borders of Russia declined to "sit
at the same table with bandits and murderers." Dr. Kramarzh, who
had just been appointed first Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia and head
of the Czechoslovak delegation in Paris, came to see me in a state of despair.
He said,

" ... This quasi-recognition of the Bolshevists without
our opinion having been asked may upset the whole position. It is an unpardonable
piece of lightmindedness."

{p. 301} ... a flutter was caused by the return from Moscow of Messrs.
William C. Bullitt and Lincoln Steffens who had been sent to Russia
towards the middle of February by Colonel House ... Mr. Philip Kerr
and, presumably, Mr. Lloyd George knew and approved of this mission.
... Potent international financial interests were at work in favour
of the immediate recognition of the Bolshevists. Those influences had
been largely responsible for the Anglo-American proposal in January
to call Bolshevist representatives to Paris at the beginning of the
Peace Conference ... The well-known American Jewish banker, Mr. Jacob
Schiff, was known to be anxious to ensure recognition for the Bolshevists,
among whom Jewish influence was predominant ... At a moment when
the Bolshevists were doing their utmost to spread revolution throughout
Europe ... a policy of recognizing them ... would have sufficed
to wreck the whole Peace Conference and Europe with it. At the end of
March, Hungary was already Bolshevist; Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland,
and even Germany were in danger, and European feeling against the blood-stained
lunatics of Russia ran extremely high.

{p. 302} Therefore, when it transpired that an American official,
connected with the Peace Conference, had returned, after a week's
visit to Moscow, with an optimistic report upon the state of Russia
and with an authorized Russian proposal for the virtual recognition
of the Bolshevist regime by April 10th, dismay was felt everywhere except
by those who had been privy to the sending of Mr. Bullitt. ...

On the afternoon of March 26th an American friend inadvertently gave
me a notion that a revival of the Prinkipo proposal, in some form,
was in the air. That evening I wrote to Northcliffe: {quote} The Americans
are again talking of recognizing the Russian Bolshevists. ... {endquote}

And, in the Paris Daily Mail of March 27th, I wrote strongly
against any proposal to recognize {quote} the desperadoes whose avowed
aim is to turn upside down the whole basis of Western civilization. {endquote}

That day Colonel House asked me to call upon him. I found him worried
both by my criticism of any recognition of the Bolshevists ...
I insisted that, unknown to him, the prime movers were Jacob Schiff,
Warburg, and other international financiers, who wished above all
to bolster up the Jewish Bolshevists in order to secure a field for
German and Jewish exploitation of Russia.

{p. 303} Colonel House argued, however, that without relations
of some kind with the Bolshevists it would be impossible to prevent
the utter ruin of Russia ... He asked me therefore to meet
him and Auchincloss next morning to see if some sound line of
policy could not be worked out. This I agreed to do; but, shortly after
leaving Colonel House, information reached me that Mr. Lloyd George and
President Wilson would probably agree next morning to recognize the Bolshevists
in accordance with Mr. Bullitt's suggestions. Feeling that there was
no time to lose I wrote, forthwith, a leading article for the Paris
Daily Mailof March 28th, called Peace with Honour." Its
principal passage ran:

{quote} The issue is whether the Allied and Associated Governments shall,
directly or indirectly, accredit an evil thing known as Bolshevism. ...
{endquote}

{p. 304} I had hardly sent this article to the printers when an American
friend, Mr. Charles R. Crane, who had been dining with President Wilson,
called to see me. He showed great alarm at the turn things were taking.
"Bullitt is back," he said, "and the President is already
talking Bullitt's language. I fear he may ruin everything. Our people at
home will certainly not stand for the recognition of the Bolshevists at
the bidding of Wall Street." He urged me to point out the danger clearly
in the Daily Mail. I reassured him and told him that what I could
say was already said and that he would find it in the Daily Mail
next morning.

Before I was up next day, Colonel House telephoned to say that he
wished to see me urgently. Apparently, to use an Americanism, my article
"had got under the President's hide." When I reached the
Crillon, House and Auchincloss looked grave. I told them that, had I
waited to discuss policy with them before writing, my article, the
chances were that there would have been no policy to discuss because
the President and, possibly, Lloyd George would have committed themselves
to recognition of the Bolshevists that very morning. The Colonel begged
me, however, in view of the delicacy of the situation to refrain from further
comment until it could be seen how things would go; and I consented, on
the understanding that nothing irrevocable would be done unless {p. 305}
I were informed beforehand.

{end of quotes from Henry Wickham Steed} The full text is at : toolkit3.html.

Ostensibly, Lenin represents the antithesis to the joint Anglo-Zionist
conspiracy for "One World". Yet some of the leaders seem to have
been on both sides.

Can Toynbee have been oblivious to the "Open Conspiracy" promoted
by H. G. Wells, a fan of Trotsky? Is the Open Society - promoted by Toynbee
- the same as the "Open Conspiracy"?

In the 1933 edition of Wells' book The Open Conspiracy, he says
it is "a movement aiming at the establishment of a world directorate"
(p. 33), "the world movement for the supercession or fusion
of existing political, economic, and social institutions" (p.
32): opencon.html.

H. G. Wells saw the end of World War I as an opportunity to create a
new world. He supported both Lenin, and the attempt to create a World Government
at the Treaty of Versailles. He also advocated the creation of a Jewish
state. His ideas for a united world drew on Jewish thought, in discussions
with David Lubin and Israel Zangwill: wells-lenin-league.html.

Bertrand Russell, a recruit to Wells' Open Conspiracy for "One
World", saw the situation first-hand when he visited Russia shortly
after the Revolution.

In his autobiography published in the 1940s, when he was anti-Soviet,
Russell wrote, "Bolshevism is a close tyrannical bureaucracy,
with a spy system more elaborate and terrible than the Tsar's, and an aristocracy
as insolent and unfeeling, composed of Americanised Jews. No vestige
of liberty remains, in thought or speech or action."russell.html.

Robert Wilton, St Petersburg correspondent for the Times of London,
also documented the role of atheistic Jews in creating Bolshevism: wilton.html.

A reader wrote to me, "Lenin was no Jew ... Trotsky was no friend
of the Jews." But Lenin did have a Jewish identity, and
Trotsky did have strong Jewish ties. Even though some Jews opposed
the new regime, that does not undo the fact that it was created by Jew.:
lenin-trotsky.html.

Surely Toynbee read Russell's autobiography; was he unaware of Wilton's
evidence? Why did he make no comment on either?

Russell, in his book about the new regime, The Practice and Theory
of Bolshevism, published in 1920 soon after his visit to Russia, makes
no mention of the Jewish connection; in the Preface of that book he even
wrote, "The Russian Revolution is one of the great heroic events
of the world's history" (Unwin paperback, London 1962, p. 7).

Why omit the Jewish connection? Because he was basically sympathetic
to Marxism - he wanted it to work. In his book Roads to Freedom,
published in 1918 before he had visited Bolshevik Russia, he wrote,

"If the Russian Revolution had been accompanied by a revolution
in Germany ... the idea of fraternity might have seemed, in
the twinkling of an eye, to have entered the world of practical politics
... If once the idea of fraternity between nations were inaugurated
with the faith and vigour belonging to a new revolution, all the
difficulties surrounding it would melt away, for all of them are due to
suspicion and the tyranny of ancient prejudice. Those who (as
is common in the English-speaking world) reject revolution as a method,
and praise the gradual piecemeal development which (we are told) constitutes
solid progress, overlook the effect of dramatic events in changing the
mood and the beliefs of whole populations. A simultaneous revolution
in Germany and Russia would no doubt have had such an effect, and
would have made the creation of a new world possible here and now."
(Unwin paperback, London 1977, p. 120).

On p. 5 below, Toynbee writes, "There has, indeed, so
far, been only one eminent communist who has genuinely been prepared
to expend his own country in the cause of propagating communism throughout
the rest of the world. This whole-hearted communist was, of course,
Trotsky".

Yet Pitirim Sorokin and Dmitri Volkogonov describe the Kronsdadt Massacre
and Trotsky's Role: kronstadt.html. Was Toynbee
unread in such material?

On p. 19 below, Toynbee writes of "the execution in 1933-39
of so many of the outstanding figures of the revolution", once
again showing a certain Trotskyist sympathy.

Certainly Trotsky was prepared to expend Russia; but many Jewish Communists
retained a loyalty to Zionism. This issue was to split the East block and
bring down "Communism": convergence.html.

The Zinoviev Letter, encouraging a Communist revolution in England in
1924, and Volkogonov's account of the Comintern: zinoviev.html.

end of excursus}

{back to Toynbee; p. 4 continued} Nor was the Bolshevik myth discredited
in Europe by the failure of communism to establish its domination there.
In Britain, for instance, the tradition of conducting politics in a constitutional
way was piquantly different from the dictatorial methods that, in Russia,
the Bolsheviks had inherited from a long line of predecessors. The 'Hands
off Russia' campaign, organized in protest against British intervention
in the Russian Civil War, received strong trade union support, and
there were mutinous incidents among the war-weary French troops and in
the French fleet sent to support the opponents of the Bolsheviks. However
strong their opposition to the communists at home, most working-class
leaders in Britain between the wars were obsessed by the notion that the
Soviet Government was in some sense the true representative of the working
class. The most bitter opponents of the new Russian regime were for
the most part the same people who were most hostile to the labour movement
at home; to have joined them in attacking Moscow would have seemed in a
sense an act of disloyalty to their own cause. Throughout the 1920s
and 1930s, it was embarrassing for a British labour leader to make serious
public criticisms of the Bolshevik system. If and when he found himself
unable to avoid doing this, he would usually make some kind of preliminary
apology for the awkward stand that he was taking. Vestiges, at least, of
this attitude outlived the Second World War. This did not prevent the Labour
Party from adopting a strongly hostile attitude to those of its members
who went over to the communists or appealed and worked for co-operation
between the two. From the outset it rejected the British Communist Party's
application for affiliation (which Lenin had urged on the reluctant British
delegates to the second Comintern congress), and in the thirties it
was equally implacable in rejecting the proposal for a popular front. Indeed,
it expelled many of the prominent advocates of this. In fact, the Bolshevik
myth was finally discredited outside the Soviet Union not by any spontaneous
revulsion on the part of the

{p. 5} western working class, but by a dramatic volteface in Russian
communist domestic politics. After Stalin's death, when Stalin had been
exposed and denounced in the Soviet Union by Khrushchev, it at last
became virtually impossible, outside the Soviet Union, to cherish
the Bolshevik myth any longer. What is remarkable, however, is not
that the myth gradually evaporated in Europe, but that it survived there
as long as it did.

{It is now known that Stalin was murdered, and that Khrushchev was one
of his murderers. The assassins were in two factions, a "Russian"
group headed by Khrushchev, and a "Zionist" group headed by Beria
and Kaganovich. The issue which precipitated the assassination was the
"Doctors' Plot": death-of-stalin.html}

This is the more remarkable, considering two points that are made in
a later chapter of the present book, by Mr McInnes. He points out that
already before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 in Russia, the western
industrial working class had abandoned, in practice, its original ideological
objective of overthrowing bourgeois society for the practical objective
of winning for itself successive slices of the alluring bourgeois cake.
Mr McInnes's second point that is extremely pertinent in this connection
is that the authoritarianism and opportunism of the Russian form of communist
organization were horrid stumbling-blocks for the communist parties which,
after 1917, had been founded in western countries on Russian initiative.
Westerners did not cease to be westerners when they became communists,
and the western political ideals of acting on principle and of respecting
a minority's right to dissent were irreconcilable with Russian authoritarianism.

The factor that has played the greatest part in defeating communist
hopes and expectations - and this both in the Soviet Union and everywhere
else - has, however, been the triumph of nationalism. Communism has
now been worsted by nationalism as decisively as liberal democracy
has been. Within the communist part of the world, national rivalries are
today as bitter and as divisive as they are within the non-communist part.

There has, indeed, so far, been only one eminent communist
who has genuinely been prepared to expend his own country in the cause
of propagating communism throughout the rest of the world. This
whole-hearted communist was, of course, Trotsky; and it is surely
no accident that Trotsky was defeated in his contest with Stalin
- the rival statesman whose policy was the inverse one. Stalin sought
to make communism serve the national interests of the Soviet Union;
and, unlike Trotsky, Stalin was not peculiar. Communists, as well as liberal
democrats, usually prove to be nationalists first whenever a conflict of
interests arises between their ideology and their country. After this had
been demonstrated in the Soviet

{p. 6} Union by Stalin's victory over Trotsky, it was demonstrated again
successively by Tito's revolt against Stalin and by communist China's pretension
to be the orthodox guardian and exponent of the communist faith - which
communist Russia has betrayed, so the Chinese communists maintain. More
recently still, we have seen the Soviet Union's east European former
satellites taking courage from the examples set by Yugoslavia and by China,
and in their turn they are now beginning to reassert their national independence.
The communist regimes imposed on them by the Soviet Union survive,
but they, too, have proved to be nationalist communist regimes,
in which nationalism takes precedence over the professedly ecumenical communist
ideology. We may guess that Vietnamese nationalism will also assert
itself against any threat of Chinese ascendancy in communist North Vietnam,
if and when the United States ceases to press North Vietnam into China's
arms.

The passage of time has also confuted Lenin's doctrine that the industrial
proletariat of Russia and of the western countries is the natural
ally of the Asian and African peoples that are being exploited by
imperialism, and that communism is the creed that can link together
these two wings of the great army of the victimized. Today the Chinese
communists are denouncing the Russian communists as representatives of
the affluent white minority of mankind who have entered into a tacit conspiracy
with the Americans for preserving this minority's illegitimate privileges.
The Chinese have taken over Lenin's doctrine that communism is the non-white
peoples' hope, but maintain that only a non-white communist Power can
be trusted to champion the non-white peoples' interests honestly. China
has, in fact, virtually declared a race-war in Chinese communism's name.

{Perhaps Mao did this; but Deng reversed it}

Thus Russian communism has failed to overcome nationalism and
racialism, and it has also failed to extinguish the historic religions.
In the Soviet Union, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Baptist Protestantism,
Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism have all managed to survive under adversity;
and, after all, this is not surprising; for all these traditional religions
offer to individual human beings something that the parvenu ideologies
do not attempt to provide. The traditional religions offer to the
individual some personal consolation and guidance for coping with the
tribulations that every one of us encounters in the course
of his life.

Fifty years after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, it is obvious that
Russian communism has failed to attain the positive objectives

{p. 7} which it was so confident of attaining at the start. It is also
obvious that it has failed to achieve its intended break with the past.
If we were to interpret this first half-century of Russian communism's
history in Marxian terms, we should diagnose the Russian communist regime's
raison d'etre as being a technological and economic one. The First
World War, we should say, revealed the gigantic Russian Empire's shocking
technological inferiority to its western neighbour Germany. This relatively
small but highly industrialied western country defeated Russia with ease.
The subsequent establishment of the communist regime in Russia can be interpreted
as Russia's device for catching up, technologically, with Germany and with
Russia's other western neighbours. Under the communist regime, Russia has
been making a forced march, under effective leadership, towards technological
efficiency up to contemporary western standards.

This interpretation of the last half-century of Russian history, with
which not all Marxists would agree, and to which many non-Marxists subscribe,
does go some way towards explaining why Russia went communist in 1917 and
why its original communism has evolved since then in a direction that is
a partial reversion to something like a 'bourgeois' regime. At the same
time, it shows that Lenin's revolution in Russia was not so radical a break
with the past as Lenin himself believed it to be. The war of l914-18 was
not the first Russian experience that had brought to light, through the
shock of military defeat, Russia's current technological backwardness by
comparison with the western world. Germany's victory over Russia in the
First World War had been anticipated by Poland's and Sweden's victories
over her in the seventeenth century. Russia's reaction on that earlier
occasion had been the grafting of a western regime - 'enlightened autocracy'
- on the traditional Russian autocracy in the Byzantine style; this western
regime had been adopted in Russia as a political instrument for producing
technological results; the purpose had been to bring Russia into line with
its western contemporaries in the technological field; and this new regime
had been introduced, for this purpose, by a revolutionary man of genius,
Peter the Great. On this interpretation of Russian history, Lenin's mission
has been a continuation of Peter's mission, and the Bolshevik Revolution
of 1917 was a resumption of the revolution that had been started by Peter
at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

{p. 8} In fact, in Russian history, interpreted in these terms, there
is a governing factor that was operating before, as well as after, 1917.
This governing factor is not one that has originated in Russia in the course
of Russia's own native development. It is something that would never have
disturbed Russia if it had not had the western world for its next-door
neighbour. The constant disturbing factor in Russian history has been
the accelerating progress of technology in the western world since the
seventeenth century. This dynamic development of western technology
has been a challenge to the non-western majority of mankind. It has
confronted all non-western peoples with a choice between mastering western
technology and falling into subjection to technologically more efficient
western Powers. Russia was the first non-western country to face this problem
and to try to save its independence by putting itself through a 'crash'
programme of technological westernization. The pioneer in this endeavour
to cope with western technology was not Lenin, however; it was his seventeenth-century
predecessor Peter. It was a stroke of luck for Russia that Peter was a
natural-born technocrat who happened to be armed with a Muscovite Tsar's
dictatorial powers.

Peter's Russian revolution anticipated Lenin's in another point as
well. It was infectious, and this was because it was an attempt to
solve a problem that was not Russia's alone, but was common to all Byzantine
and other non-western countries as and when they came into collision with
the technologically dynamic modern West. Russia's eighteenth-century
achievements under its Petrine regime inspired the Turks to
follow suit in self-defence, and the Greeks to follow suit in order
to liberate themselves from the Turks. Even the Meiji revolution of
1868 in Japan was an indirect result of Peter's pioneer work. The present
is not the first time that a revolutionary Russia has suffered from its
pupils' ingratitude. Turkey's reaction to the shock of Russia's victory
over her in the war of 1768-74 was fundamentally the same as China's reaction
now. Turkey's, like China's, aim in imitating Russia's adoption of western
technology was to save itself from falling under Russia's dominion.

The two earliest modern revolutions were the sixteenth-century Dutch
and seventeenth-century English revolutions. These, being the earliest,
had no contemporary external source of inspiration to draw upon. They challenged
modern western autocracy in the name of traditional native rights that
were legacies from the Middle

{p. 9} Ages. The Dutch and English revolutions were, in theory, expressions
of conservatism, though, in seeking to vindicate old rights, they fell
into claiming new rights that had no historical precedents. By contrast,
the French Revolution did not cast back to France's own medieval past.
At least part of its inspiration came from abroad; for it was inspired
by the French philosophes, and, by 1789, these had been theorizing, for
a century, about English post-revolutionary practice. On this point - and
it is a point of capital importance - the Russian and Chinese communist
revolutions have been of the French, not of the Dutch and English, type.
Their theoretical inspiration was derived from foreign precedents, and,
by comparison with the English inspiration of the French Revolution, their
inspiration has been highly exotic. In borrowing from England, France was
borrowing from a fellow member of its own family circle of western peoples.
At bottom, French and English traditions and institutions and ideas all
had common western roots. On the other hand, the non-western countries
that have adopted communism have taken over an ideology that has no roots
at all in their own native traditions.

When we survey Russian and Chinese history during the ages before Russia's
and China's encounters with the West, we find nothing here that suggests
that the Russians or the Chinese would ever have dreamed of communism,
in the sense in which it is now understood, if this ideology had not already
been manufactured in the West and had not been waiting, ready-made, for
non-western peoples to import. Communism, like liberal democracy and
enlightened autocracy, is a western invention which can be accounted
for only in terms of the western civilization's previous history. The founding
fathers of communism, Marx and Engels, were born and brought up in the
Rhineland and did their work in England - Marx as a reader in the British
Museum library and Engels as the manager of a small factory in Manchester.
They were thoroughbred westerners like Cromwell and the Emperor Joseph
and Robespierre, and they were not singular in being prophets who were
without honour in their own world, but who made their ideological fortunes
abroad, quite contrary to their own expectations. Marx did not have his
eye on Russia; he felt a nineteenth-century German's contempt for that
backward eastern country. Marx expected that England would be the first
country to go communist, because England had been the first country to
enter on the capitalist phase of an economic and social course of evolution
that he believed to be predetermined. If Marx could have lived to see

{p. 10} Russia seize the role of being the first country to make the
communist revolution, he would have certainly been astonished and would
probably have been displeased; for this first great practical success
for Marxism was at the same time a confutation of Marxist theory.

{That is why the current type of Marxism in the West, going under the
guise of the Green, Feminist, Gay and other "minority" movements,
is not recognized as Marxism.

Isaac Deutscher wrote that the Bolshevik Government, in its first years,
was run by "emigres had lived many years in the West", who looked
down on Russian "backwardness" and pursued "internationalist"
politics:

"... they were Marxists in partibus infidelium, West European
revolutionaries acting against a non-congenial Oriental background, which
... tried to impose its tyranny upon them. Only revolution in the West
could relieve them from that tyranny ... "

"No sooner had Bolshevism mentally withdrawn into its national
shell than this attitude became untenable. The party of the revolution
had to stoop to its semi-Asiatic environment. It had to cut itself loose
from the specifically Western tradition of Marxism ... "

Beria and Gorbachev attempted to return to this "Western"
Marxism: each emphatically rejected Stalin: convergence.html.

But Deutscher was a Jewish Trotskytist, and this "Western"
Marxism is Trotskyism by another name: new-left.html}

Marxism is not, however, the only creed that has been ousted from its
birthplace but has made its fortune on alien ground. Christianity, for
instance, was rejected by the Jews but was adopted by the non-Jewish majority
of the population of the Roman Empire. Buddhism was eventually rejected
in India but was adopted in Eastern Asia. This is no paradox. A religion
or ideology attracts adherents where it is able to meet a spiritual or
psychological need, and it does not necessarily meet a need
in its own homeland. The Jews, being monotheists already, felt no
need for the trinitarian dilution of monotheism which Christianity offered.
On the other hand, this monotheism with a tincture of polytheism in it
did meet the needs of a polytheistic Greco-Roman society that was already
groping its way towards a vision of divine unity. The Hindus, being ascetic
and metaphysical-minded already, felt no need for the temperate asceticism
and minimal metaphysical-mindedness of Buddhism. On the other hand, these
characteristically Indian spiritual gifts of Buddhism - offered as they
were, by Buddhism, in a moderate dosage - were attractive to the peoples
of Eastern Asia because for these peoples, whose native religions and philosophies
were for the most part this-worldly and matter-of-fact, Buddhism's Indian
otherworldliness filled a spiritual vacuum. In China, this spiritual
vacuum had already been partly filled by the transcendental philosophy
of Taoism. Buddhism gave to China, in a more imposing form, what Taoism
had been seeking to give before Buddhism's arrival there.

{Toynbee is not quite right about India. What we call Hinduism is very
different from the religion of 3,000 years ago, Brahmanism. The vedic religion
had horse-sacrifices; Hinduism has no sacrifices. The ahimsa religions,
begun 3,000 years ago with Jainism and the Upanishads, culminated
in Asoka's empire with its established Buddhist church. Hinduism developed
and ousted Buddhism, by incorporating much of Buddhism: by synthesising
Brahmanism and Buddhism. In the same way, Christianity developed out of
Judaism but ousted Judaism by synthesising Judaism with other religious
traditions, such as ahimsa ones from India, Zoroastrian-derived dualism,
the Osiris-based resurrection, the Isis-based madonna, and the Ishtar-based
Queen of Heaven: schopenhauer.html}

Marxism's fortunes have been similar to Buddhism's and Christianity's.
In its western birthplace, Marxism has been a drug in the market. It has
been just one representative of the modern western world's innumerable
brood of social and political ideologies, and, for a majority of westerners,
it has been an unattractive ideology. It is cruder, more violent, and more
dogmatic than many others of the contemporary western-made ideologies among
which a westerner can take his choice; and, since Marx's day, violence
has come to make less and less appeal to the western industrial working
class, since this class's material conditions were already being improved
by non-violent means by the time when Marxist propaganda got under

{p. 11} way. Therefore the western-made ideology of Marxism has been
rejected by the western world, with the exception of a small western
communist minority whose prospects are as bleak as those of the
Jewish Christians in Palestine were when Christianity was making
its fortune among the non-Jewish majority of the people of the Roman
Empire. On the other hand, Marxism attracts non-western peoples by the
qualities that repel westerners. Its violence and radicalism offer to non-westerners
the prospect that, if they swallow this potent western medicine, it may
implant in them the western stamina that all non-westerners need if they
are to hold their own in a westernizing world. In other words, Marxism
fitted the mood of the non-western peoples when these were ripe for revolting
against western dominance. It is a creed of western origin that indicts
the western 'establishment'. It is thus able to express a will to revolt
against the West in terms that, being western, have prestige - for the
West does have prestige, in virtue of its dominance, even among peoples
that are striving to bring its domination over them to an end. Psychology
counts for more than economics in deciding whether the propagation of a
religion or an ideology shall succeed or shall fail. If Marx had thought
in psychological terms and not in economic terms, he would not have been
surprised to learn that the two leading communist countries today are both
non-western.

This may perhaps at least partly explain why communism has captivated
Russia and China. We have still to see how long the effects of this powerful
western drug are going to take in working themselves off in these two great
non-western countries. We have also still to see whether Russia and China
are going to succeed or to fail in their efforts to propagate their borrowed
western ideology in other non-western countries.

The fact that communism is not a native Russian or Chinese product does
not necessarily mean that Russian and Chinese attempts to propagate communism
will fail. The ideas of the French Revolution were derived partly from
what the French thought were the principles underlying political and constitutional
arrangements in England; yet, in the French version of them, these ideas
proved to be more catching than their exemplification across the Channel.
Today Russia and China are playing the role of serving as the disseminators
of an ideology that they did not originate, and this is not the first time
that they have played this part. Russia adopted Eastern Orthodox Christianity
from Byzantium and propagated it among

{p. 12 the peoples in her Siberian hinterland. China adopted Buddhism
from India and propagated it in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. To propagate
an alien ideology is not impracticable; all the same, it is a tour de
force. The outcome will depend partly on how the missionary people
regards itself, and partly on how it is regarded by the foreign peoples
whom it is seeking to convert.

In the past, China and Russia have each had confidence in its capacity
to sustain the missionary role. The Chinese have thought of China as
being 'the Middle Kingdom', that is, the uniquely civilized centre
of the human world. They have thought of the Chinese Empire as being 'All
that is under Heaven', that is, as being sovereign, or at least suzerain,
even over barbarians beyond the pale of civilization (that is, Chinese
civilization). What is more, this Chinese claim was accepted by most of
the non-Chinese peoples, near or remote, with whom the Chinese came into
contact before the British assault on China in 1839 - an assault that brought
with it a sudden catastrophic change in China's standing in the world.
This was not, of course, the first time that China had been assaulted with
success. Japanese pirates had raided the country from the sea before the
first western ships reached its coasts. Central Asian nomads had conquered
it partially, and, in the Mongols' case, completely, from the landward
side. But these barbarian naval and military conquerors had continued
to feel awe and admiration for China's culture; and China made the
same imposing impression on western observers in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries, when it was under Mongol rule, and again in the modern age,
from the sixteenth century down to 1839. Voltaire put China on a pedestal
as a model for the West to imitate. Eighteenth-century French philosophes
abandoned the traditional Christian belief in original sin for the
more optimistic, but perhaps less realistic, Confucian faith
in the natural goodness of human nature. Even after 1839, the westerners
and the Japanese who were now treating the Chinese as 'natives' still continued
to appreciate Chinese art.

Thus China enjoyed cultural prestige in the eyes of foreign peoples
that were geographically remote and were militarily stronger than China
was; and this cultural prestige also imposed itself upon neighbours that
offered a stubborn resistance to Chinese political domination. The Koreans,
the Japanese, and the Vietnamese readily received from China not only
its own cultural products, such as the characters and the Confucian
philosophy, but also an Indian religion,

{p. 13} Buddhism of which China was not the creator but was merely
the transmitter.

The Russians, for their part, before they became converts to, and propagators
of, communism, had already regarded themselves on two occasions as being
the sole residuary legatees of an orthodox faith that had been betrayed
by its originators, from whom the Russians had received it. When, at
the Council of Florence in 1439, the East Roman Government accepted ecclesiastical
union with Rome under the supremacy of the Papacy, the Russians refused
to endorse an agreement that they held to be a betrayal of Eastern
Orthodoxy; and, after the Ottoman Turkish conquest of Constantinople
in 1453, the Russian church considered itself to be the only one of the
Eastern Orthodox churches that was still preserving the true faith, immune
from both Frankish and Turkish domination. Again, after Peter the Great
had, in effect, replaced Eastern Orthodox Christianity by modern western
secular autocracy as Russia's state religion, the Russian Tsardom prided
itself, in the Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic age, on having been the only
absolute monarchy in Europe that had not succumbed to the ideas of the
French Revolution.

Russia, however, was much less successful in the pre-communist age than
China was in inducing its neighbours to take it at its own high valuation.
Its western neighbours held that, though Christian, it was schismatic from
the Western Christian standpoint, and that anyway, it was backward and
indeed barbarous. It was more significant still that its fellow Eastern
Orthodox Christians, too, looked down on Russia. It was politically independent
and powerful, while the Greeks, Bulgars, Serbs, and Georgians were politically
subject to Venice, the Ottoman Empire, and the Persian Empire. Yet Russia's
political power was outweighed, in these other Eastern Orthodox peoples'
eyes, by its cultural inferiority to them. In matters of Eastern Orthodox
Christian doctrine and practice, it was still they who set the standard
for Russia, not vice versa. Nor did Russia improve its standing in its
neighbours' eyes as a result of its reception of secular western civilization
in and after the time of Peter the Great. The Petrine revolution did induce
the western countries to admit Russia into their society, but they continued
to treat it as a backward neophyte who did no credit to the civilization
that it was attempting clumsily to adopt. What are Russias and China's
respective prospects of success in

{p. 14} their present common role of being propagators of communism
- an ideology that was originally alien to both of them alike? Our guesses
at the answer to this question about the future will be influenced by our
knowledge of the two countries' respective pre-communist pasts. We may
perhaps gain some further light if we recall the reasons for France's success
in propagating the partly alien (that is, English) 'ideas of the French
Revolution'.

Like Chinese cultural exports, these French cultural exports found ready
takers, and these among peoples that were up in arms against being dominated
militarily and politically by a foreign Power. To compare small things
with great, France, in the western world, had been a miniature 'Middle
Kingdom' in the Chinese sense of the term. France's centrality, unlike
China's, had not been uncontested, yet neither Italy in the Middle Ages
nor Britain in the modern age had succeeded in wresting from France its
primacy. The shock that the French Revolution gave to the rest of
the western world could not and did not wipe out the cultural prestige
that France had been accumulating in the course of ages. France
continued to have many gifts to give, and these continued to be attractive
to other western peoples, even now that they were being presented in a
revolutionary form.

Revolutionary and Napoleonic France's greatest asset was its wealth
in capable cultivated men of the professional class. The Revolution gave
such men their opportunity; the subsequent French conquests extended this
opportunity's geographical scope. A host of Frenchmen of this kind rationalized
the law and the system of public administration, first in France itself,
and afterwards in Italy, the Low Countries, western Germany, and Switzerland.
Heine, the Jew for whom the French regime spelled emancipation, has
expressed a feeling that was shared with him by millions
of non-Jews in these countries. It felt as if a stuffy house had suddenly
been ventilated by a great breath of vivifying fresh air. The Napoleonic
regime, outside France's pre-revolution frontiers, was short-lived, but
its effects there were enduring. The ending of the French military and
political occupation could not undo the social, cultural, and psychological
consequences of this historic episode.

Here we have an important point in which both Russia and China in 1967
are at a serious disadvantage by comparison with France at the turn of
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. To their credit, the communist
regimes in both countries have been making efforts,

{p. 15} at home, to raise the level of modern education, which, under
the pre-communist dispensation, had been low in terms of the average level
in the contemporary western world. Russia has now had half a century for
increasing its fund of modern-educated citizens; China has had eighteen
years. Yet today Russia, as well as China, probably still has a deficit
of such citizens for meeting its own domestic requirements. Certainly,
neither country has a surplus that it can afford to employ abroad on world-wide
propaganda operations. Both the Soviet Union and continental China are,
of course, doing propaganda work abroad on a considerable scale, but probably
they are doing this to the detriment of their own development at home.

This dearth of competent citizens is one of the factors that, first
in Russia and then in China, defeated the attempt to establish a liberal
democratic regime and led to the establishment of a communist regime instead.
A communist regime can be operated by a small number of competent citizens;
a liberal democratic regime requires a much larger number of them to enable
it to work successfully. The presence of a communist regime is presumptive
evidence of a shortage of citizens of this kind. Conversely, if there is
a large number of them, they are unlikely to put up with an authoritarian
regime of any kind - communist, military, or dynastic.

This suggests that the present communist regimes in Russia and China
are not nearly so well equipped as the revolutionary and Napoleonic regime
in France was for propagating their ideology abroad.

If Russia and China are both labouring under this common handicap, which
of the two has the better prospects? Probably China, but this only within
the limits of the area in which pre-1839 China enjoyed cultural prestige,
that is, within the limits of Eastern Asia, which, besides China, includes
Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. Today, Eastern Asia harbours nearly half the
human race - nearly half, but not more than that.

On a visit to Japan at the end of 1956, I had the impression that, as
a result of Japan's failure to conquer China in the war of 1931-45, China's
traditional prestige in Japanese eyes had revived. I found that many Japanese
of the rising generation were now learning Chinese, in the hope that a
knowledge of Chinese might be a passport to a job if trade between Japan
and China were to be resumed on a considerable scale. After the defeat
of China by Britain in 1839,

{p. 16} and again by Britain and France jointly in 1858-60, and after
the success of the westernizing Meiji Revolution in Japan in 1868, the
Japanese had for a time taken to seeing China through contemporary
western eyes and not in the traditional Japanese light. They had come
to look upon the Chinese as being backward, helpless, and contemptible
'natives'. Japan's subsequent failure to conquer China, working together
with its utter defeat in the Second World War, has, I believe, had the
effect of restoring in Japanese eyes the image of China as the great central
civilized Power which, before the century of China's temporary humiliation
(1839-1945), was traditional in Japan, as well as in China itself. If this
is a correct diagnosis, then Japan in the latter part of the twentieth
century may prove to be as open to Chinese communist propaganda as it was
to Chinese Buddhist propaganda in the earlier part of the sixth century.
Of course this does not mean that Japan would submit to Chinese military
and political domination. Even if Japan were, one day, to adopt communism
from China, it would be a nationalist Japanese communism, and the nationalism
in this mixture would prevail over the communism in it if there were to
be a clash between the interests of the two ideologies. As a matter of
fact, it now seems improbable that Japan will go communist, however high
the level to which communist China's prestige in Japan may rise. Post-Second-World-War
Japan is making such immense technological and industrial progress under
a non-communist regime that communism of any brand seems likely to have
little attraction there.

As for Korea and Vietnam, their traditional policy towards China has
been the same as Japan's. They have embraced Chinese culture but have resisted
Chinese domination, and this traditional attitude of theirs seems likely
to persist. In both countries, nationalism seems likely to take precedence
over any other ideology. This means that, in both countries, reunification
will be the paramount objective, and will be welcomed whether the regime
under which it is achieved happens to be a communist or a non-communist
one. In Vietnam, whatever the military outcome of the present war,
eventual political reunification can be predicted with some confidence;
and there, at any rate, it seems probable that reunification, when it
comes, will be under a communist regime. But it also seems probable
that a communist reunited Vietnam will be just as determined to maintain
its independence against a communist China as a communist Yugoslavia is
to maintain hers against a communist Russia. This

{p. 17} can be predicted because, at present, nationalism is the strongest
ideology in the world and no other ideology can hold its own against nationalism
if and when there is a conflict of interests.

It looks, then, as if China is likely to recover its historic position
of being 'the Middle Kingdom' of Eastern Asia, but it also looks
as if it is unlikely to be more successful in the future than it
has been in the past in dominating politically its East Asian neighbours,
even if these prove to find Chinese culture as attractive today as they
found it in the past. Beyond the bounds of Eastern Asia, there seems to
be no ground for expecting that Chinese prestige is going to stand high.
China's traditional claim to be 'the Middle Kingdom' of Eastern Asia was
in consonance with the historical realities. On the other hand, its traditional
claim that the Chinese Empire amounted to 'All that is under Heaven' was
chimerical. It was founded on Chinese ignorance of half the world - a half
of the world in which there was of course, a reciprocal ignorance of China.
Today, China does have a foothold in one little country in this other half
of the world. But Albania is the smallest and most backward of all the
countries of eastern Europe. Some of the more important east European countries
that became the Soviet Union's unwilling political satellites after the
end of the Second World War may now be playing China off against the Soviet
Union as part of their strategy for recovering their freedom from Russian
domination. But obviously none of them is intending to submit to Chinese
domination in place of Russian. The mere fact that they are communist countries
does not make them willing to be subject to either of the two communist
super-powers. Though they are communist, Russia's European allies are nationalist
first and foremost. We may therefore expect that China's influence in eastern
Europe will be ephemeral, and its prospects in Africa seem to be no brighter
on a long view. This or that African country may be willing to accept Chinese
aid against some African neighbour with which it has a local quarrel, but,
in the long run, China's presence in Africa is surely going to be as unwelcome
to Africans as Russia's presence or as the presence of the United States
and the ex-imperial west European Powers. The only country outside Eastern
Asia in which China's prospects of exercising an enduring influence look
promising is a non-communist South Asian country, Pakistan. The common
interest that draws China and Pakistan together is a nationalistic one.
Both countries have a common enemy in India.

{p. 18} To sum up, China's prospects of being able to extend
the range of its political domination seem unpromising everywhere. It has
better prospects of re-establishing its cultural influence -
but this only in Eastern Asia, not in the other half of the world.
If this is the truth, China's prospects, outside its own frontiers, are
mediocre. Yet by comparison with Russia's prospects, China's are relatively
good. China can look forward at least to recovering its traditional cultural
prestige in Eastern Asia, whereas Russia - notwithstanding its recent achievements
in atomic weaponry, rocketry, and spacemanship - seems likely to continue
to be looked down upon, as being culturally inferior, in the other Eastern
Orthodox Christian countries, as well as in the West. Even within the bounds
of the Soviet Union itself the western provinces are restive under Russian
ascendancy, because they feel that Great Russia is relatively backward
in civilization. There is the same feeling in the Soviet Union's two Eastern
Orthodox Christian allies, Romania and Bulgaria, and the reaction is still
stronger in the three Western Christian countries, Hungary, Czechoslovakia,
and Poland. All the east European former satellites of the Soviet Union
aspire to regain their complete independence, as Yugoslavia has already
gained hers. Russia has never been a 'Middle Kingdom' for any of its neighbours
- except, perhaps, for some of the more backward peoples in Siberia, the
Caucasus, and Central Asia. This lack of cultural prestige is a formidable
handicap for Russia in its present effort to spread its influence round
the world.

This view might seem to be belied by the depth and persistence of the
devotion to Russia exhibited by some leading western writers, artists,
and intellectuals. For the hopes raised by 1917 were not confined to the
more radical sections of the organized labour movement. On the European
continent particularly, and to some extent in the United States,
large numbers of writers and artists and intellectuals felt deeply drawn
to the new regime, and responded to the promise of a new beginning
in human history that would substantiate the belief expressed by Marx and
Engels when they wrote that with the triumph of socialism mankind would
move from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom. Shaken and
outraged by the war, as these western intellectuals were, to them the first
act of the new government - the decree on peace passed on the day following
the seizure of power - demonstrated both the guilt of their own society
and the possibility that its evils could be eradicated. To these convictions
were added the infection spread by the excitement and

{p. 19} optimism which informed the work of Russian writers and artists
in the early years of the revolution, ephemeral though they turned out
to be. Together, they generated a sense of commitment to a lofty cause
that long outlived its origins. The intellectual life of Europe after
the First World War cannot be understood unless the strength of the attraction
exercised by the events of November 1917 is given its full due.

In the thirties the myth of 1917 gained a new lease of life.
When millions were unemployed and hungry people demonstrated in the streets
of London and New York, Paris and Berlin, when the problems of the capitalist
system seemed more intractable than ever before and its apparent requirements
more nonsensical, when Hitler's party was making its way to power, the
need to believe in the existence of a more rational, more humane society,
brought new recruits into or near the communist fold. For some, a closer
acquaintance with the realities of Soviet life was enough to put an end
to their attachment - Andre Gide is perhaps the outstanding example.
In Germany the stupidity of the policy imposed by Moscow on the German
Communist Party drove many of its leading intellectuals into opposition.
For others - and this seems to have been particularly the case in the
United States - the series of public trials and the execution in
1933-39 of so many of the outstanding figures of the revolution, the suicide
of others, and the assassination of Trotsky cut the cord. On those
who witnessed them, the realities of communist policy in Spain made a similar
impact, and the Soviet- German agreement of 1939 generated another wave
of resignations. The same pattern of disillusion and rejection was repeated
after the war when Stalin excommunicated Tito, and when Soviet troops crushed
the risings in Berlin in 1953 and in Hungary three years later.

Nevertheless, the attraction endures - the names of Picasso and Sartre
come to mind (not that either of them has ever formally been a communist).
Their case illustrates two curious features of the situation of the communisant
intelligentsia of the West. First, their support for Russia has very little
that is positive about it - this is not the reflection of Russian prestige,
it is almost entirely the automatic corollary of their dislike of their
own society - Sartre's 'I shall hate the bourgeois to my last breath'.
(Among the younger generation this dislike - 'alienation', to use the current
jargon - takes non-political forms; in politics, as in other respects,
they reject

{p. 20} the paths chosen by the generation of the thirties.) It is less
easy to explain the paradoxical contrast between the style - using the
word in its widest sense - of Russian arts and letters, and the style of
Moscow's supporters outside the USSR. Long after radical experiments
in these fields were suppressed in the Soviet Union, and the dead
hand of the bureaucracy imposed its disciplined conformism, many of
the least conformist, least disciplined writers and artists outside remained
unmoved. Picasso's 'formalism' is anathema to the Union of Soviet Artists;
Sartre's existentialism is sometimes condemned, usually ignored, by Soviet
philosophers. Brecht is far less often staged in Moscow and Leningrad (for
many years not at all) than in New York, Paris, and London. Socialist realism,
still the offlcial creed of Soviet literati, finds no room for the innovations
and experiments of 'progressive' writers in the West. Composers were at
one time asked - indeed instructed - to turn out 'tunes' that would appeal
to the widest audience of the toilers. The Russian translation of a Gunter
Grass novel omits all the 'erotic' passages. And though Louis Aragon may
publicly deplore the imprisonment of some Soviet writers and the boycott
of others, the need is still strong to preserve the myth, to keep bright
the picture of a world that, if not ideal, is better than their own.

{These Marxists in the West reject Stalin, but represent an alternative
kind, the Trotskyist, just as Protestants reject the Catholic variant of
Christianity}

Understandably, there is for them something attractive in the importance
attached by the Soviet authorities to the artist's function, to his purpose
in society, to the services he can perform in education and propaganda,
in helping to shape the 'new Soviet man'. The strength of the concern they
show, their serious (if misguided) appreciation of what the artist and
intellectual can contribute to a country, though it carries with it the
acceptance of the tastes and judgments of a philistine bureaucracy, may
seem preferable to the position of perpetual suspect outsider whose job
is to entertain, divert, and please.

But for the enhancement of its prestige, Russia's greatest asset is
the technological and economic progress that it has succeeded in making
during the first half century of its communist dispensation. This is no
doubt one of the reasons why it is spending on spacemanship resources
that, from any other point of view than that of publicity and propaganda,
would be better employed on productive public works. Communist
Russia's spacemanship is a crude but easily understandable advertisement
of its technological success, and this advertisement is calculated to make
Russian communism look

{p. 21} like a talisman for countries that possess great undeveloped
natural resources but that, under non-communist regimes, have failed so
far to develop these resources for the benefit of the indigent majority
of the population. Venezuela and Libya are examples of such countries in
which natural wealth abounds while the mass of the people still remains
poor. This is a politically explosive situation, and it is one from which
communist Russia might profit politically in virtue of its impressive technological
and economic record. Here Russia has a potential political leverage
which China does not possess - at any rate, not yet.

An estimate of communist Russia's and communist China's influence on
other parts of the world up to the year 1967 would be incomplete and therefore
unrealistic if it took account of positive effects only. Negative effects
are just as real, and they may eventually turn out, in retrospect, to have
been more important. The most potent negative effect of communism outside
the communist countries has been in the United States. At the present moment,
China, not Russia, is the American people's and government's principal
communist bugbear, but it is Russia - which went communist nearly one-third
of a century earlier than China did - that has had the portentous effect
on the American outlook and on American policy - and this in the domestic
American field, as well as in the world-wide ideological, political, and
military arena. This effect of the communist revolution in Russia on the
United States is of major importance in its influence on the course of
the world's history, considering that, as the cumulative result of the
two world wars, the United States has become the leading western Power.

The capture of the Russian Empire by communism in and after 1917 was
the first event in the Old World, since the creation of the United States,
that awoke American minds to an awareness of the possibility that the American
way of life, and perhaps even the political independence of the United
States, was, after all, not secure. The awakening was sudden, and the subsequent
effect of it has been traumatic. This has been a psychologically revolutionary
new departure from what had been the prevalent American attitude towards
international affairs since the achievement of independence. The United
States severed its political ties with Britain after Britain had evicted
France from North America. The two events, taken together and followed
up by the Louisiana Purchase and the enunciation of the Monroe Doctrine,
made the American people feel that

{p. 22} they had achieved not only independence but also security within
the broad bounds of their own hemisphere. This belief, in its turn, made
them feel that they could afford to be indifferent spectators of any events,
however earth-shaking, in the Old World.

The most recent and most surprising illustration of this traditional
American sense of security was the American people's failure to appreciate
the gravity of the German threat to the security of the United States
in both the First and the Second World War. In both wars their impulse
was to remain neutral, on the assumption that, as far as America's national
interests went, it was a matter of indifference for America which of the
European contending alliances won. The United States did, of course, eventually
intervene in both wars, and in each case its immense industrial potential
made Germany's defeat inevitable. Yet probably the United States would
not have become a belligerent if it had not been driven into belligerency
- by Germany in the first war and by Germany's ally Japan in the second.
Even after its experience of the German temper in the two wars, the United
States still appears to feel no mistrust of German militarism. Since the
Second World War it has deliberately re-armed Germany to serve as its ally
against the Soviet Union.

In the two wars, the United States suffered serious injury at German
hands. The Germans killed or wounded hundreds of thousands of American
soldiers and sank many dozens of American merchant ships. By contrast,
no American soldiers have been killed, and no American ships sunk, by Russian
hands so far. Again, any atrocities that the Russians may have committed
under the Tsarist and the communist regimes in Russia are eclipsed by the
atrocities committed by the Germans, especially under the nazi regime.
Yet the American people have never been either seriously alarmed, or even
passionately indignant, at any German acts. In spite of these acts, the
Americans have had a strong desire to think of the Germans as being innocuous
and respectable. On the other hand, since Russia went communist in and
after 1917, the majority of Americans - though they have suffered no injury
at Russian hands - have thought of the Russians as being ogres, and since
the end of the Second World War they have eagerly accepted any anti-Russian
regime in any country as their ally. However black the record of an anti-Russian
regime may be, its anti-Russian attitude is a warrant of respectability
in a great many American eyes. This contrast, within the last half-century,
between the respective American attitudes towards Russia and

{p. 23} towards Germany is startling. It requires explanation; and the
explanation is to be found in the violence of the American reaction
to the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Since 1917, the traditional policy of the United States has veered round
to its extreme opposite. In the days of the Holy Alliance, American
sympathy was always on the side of peoples that were struggling to liberate
themselves from despotic governments - and this not only in the western
hemisphere but all over the world. Read what Metternich wrote to the Emperor
Alexander I apropos of the promulgation of the Monroe Doctrine:

{quote} These United States of America have astonished Europe by a new
act of revolt, more unprovoked, fully as audacious, and no less dangerous
than the former. ... In fostering revolutions wherever they show
themselves, in regretting those which have failed, in extending a helping
hand to those which seem to prosper, they lend new strength to the
apostles of sedition, and reanimate the courage of every conspirator. If
this flood of pernicious example should extend over the whole of America,
what would become of our religious and political institutions, of the moral
force of our governments, and of the conservative system which has saved
Europe from complete dissolution? {endquote} {footnote 1: Quoted by Dexter
Perkins in The United States and Latin America (Louisiana Sttlte
University Press, 1961), pp. 46-7.}

These words might have been written by John Foster Dulles apropos of
the Soviet Union. On the map of the United States you will find a number
of places named after nineteenth-century European fighters for freedom.
As late as the close of the nineteenth century the United States intervened
to liberate Cuba from Spain. As late as that, the American people still
thought of themselves as being the champions of freedom - a free people
that was eager to see other people win, in their turn, the freedom that
the American people had won for themselves. Today, 'so-called wars of
liberation' excite far less American sympathy. If they evoke any American
action, this takes the shape of an American expeditionary force to extinguish
the 'brush-fire'. The American argument is that an insurrection
that is liberal at the start may turn communist later, so the United
States cannot afford to let even a liberal revolution run its course without
American intervention against it. When Fidel Castro took up arms against
the Batista regime in Cuba, he did not win the wholehearted American sympathy
that had been won by the Cuban insurgents against Spanish rule in the eighteen-nineties.
For a brief interval there was indeed a

{p. 24} good measure of support and approval, since the regime against
which Castro was revolting had been an abominable one. But these were soon
forfeited, and the American attitude settled down to one of deep suspicion
and hostility.

This reversal of American policy has been dramatic. What, then, is the
explanation ? The ultimate explanation is, no doubt, 'the deceitfulness
of riches'. Wealth does produce, in its possessors, the unhappy moral
effects that are denounced in the Gospels; and, between the date of
the United States' achievement of independence and the capture of Russia
by communism in 1917, the United States had become an incomparably rich
country.

To the minds of well-to-do Americans, communism looked, from the date
of its triumph in Russia, like an infectious disease that might prove catching
even in the United States itself. When, later, the American people woke
up to the truth that the annihilation of distance by the progress
of technology had deprived them also of their fancied security
against military attack from abroad, there was bound to be a cumulative
American reaction. If it was true that the width of the Atlantic and Pacific
Oceans no longer gave the United States physical protection against potential
attempts from abroad to rob the American people of their wealth, then the
United States' traditional policy of isolationism could no longer give
her the security she was still determined to have. This novel precariousness
of the situation suggested to some American minds - for example, Mr John
Foster Dulles - that henceforth, in order to make itself secure at home,
the United States must sally out beyond its own frontiers to nip
in the bud any subversive movement anywhere in the world, even on the
opposite side of the globe. If this policy had been carried out to its
extreme logical conclusion, and if the United States had not been a
democracy in which issues are freely and vigorously debated, and in
which the Administration's will is not law, the United States might
have found itself committed to Metternich's policy of worldwide
repression - a policy that the American people detested when it was
practised by Metternich himself. This would have been calamitous because
that policy is bound, by its very nature, to fail sooner or later, as Metternich's
own experience has demonstrated. The Metternichian policy is to stop change;
and change cannot be stopped, because change is another name for life.

The American people's enrichment would presumably have induced them
to adopt a defensive-minded conservative stance sooner or

{p. 25} later. But the event that moved the country to become the conscious
and deliberate champion of conservatism and to drop its traditional championship
of revolution was the Russian Revolution of 1917; and in restrospect the
effect of this revolution on the United States may prove to have been more
important - and possibly more lasting too - than its effect on Russia itself.
Since 1917, the United States has fancied itself in the role of the world's
defender against monolithic world communism.

Monolithic world communism was originally a dream of Lenin's,
and the passage of half a century has demonstrated that this dream is an
illusion. Today, each of the communist countries is just as narrowly nationalistic-minded
as each of the non-communist countries, and this is recognized in the communist
countries themselves. In the Soviet Union, in the east European countries
allied to it, in Yugoslavia, in China, no-one any longer pretends that
communism is presenting a united front to the rest of the world. The
only country in which Lenin's dream is still haunting people's minds today
is - paradoxically - the United States.

This is dreamland, not reality; for communism has proved not to be the
world-unifying ideological force that Lenin predicted it would be. It has
proved not to be the strongest ideology in the present-day world. It has
been defeated by nationalism, and this is unfortunate for mankind; for
in the atomic age nationalism is a far more serious threat than communism
is to the survival of the human race. There is, however, an impersonal
force at work in the present-day world that is still more powerful than
nationalism, and that is technology boosted by the systematic application
of science. In the modern world, technology is the key to material power,
and therefore, on a planet whose habitable surface is partitioned among
about 125 local sovereign States, every State must have up-to-date technology.
If a country were to fall behind in the race for technological development,
it would go under. In order to have up-to-date technology, a country must
have efficient technicians, scientists, and administrators. The representatives
of these walks of life are birds of a feather, in whatever country they
may happen to be working and whatever the ideology that happens to be professed
by that country's government. The technicians, scientists, and administrators
of the worlds 125 States can understand each other; they are, in fact,
the nucleus of a new citizen-body - a body of people who are citizens
of the world rather than citizens of some fraction of it.

{p. 26} Through the uniform professional action of this nucleus
of world-citizens in every country, life is now being standardized in all
countries. In consequence, our distinctive ideological labels, which
are focuses of such strong emotion, are becoming less and less relevant
to the facts of life. No doubt the labels will be retained long after the
local ways of life which the labels purport to distinguish have in truth
become indistinguishable from each other. These cherished emblems of
perilous discord will die hard, but it can be prophesied that they
will all die sooner or later - unless, of course, they first
inveigle the human race into committing mass suicide by fighting an
atomic world war in the near future. We may guess that the United
States' anti-communist label will prove rather more durable than
the Soviet Union's communist label, but we may also guess that
both labels will gradually fade out. By the end of the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics' second half-century of existence, the terms 'Soviet'
and 'Socialist' will have become meaningless, because the de facto constitutions
of the Soviet Union and the United States will have become virtually identical.

We may even guess that, by that date, neither the Soviet Union nor
the United States will any longer be sovereign (except, perhaps, in
the nominal sense in which each of the component states of the United States
is sovereign today). One of the characteristics of the evolution of
technology is that, in order to continue to operate effectively,
it has to operate on a constantly expanding scale. The day is now
not far distant at which the minimum unit of effective technological
operation, for all purposes of any importance, will be the entire
surface of this planet, together with a thin but progressively thickening
envelope of outer space. Technology, like truth (and technology is a
prosaic form of truth) is mighty and will prevail. Nationalism seems
to have no prospect of being able to stand up to technology, powerful
though the hold of nationalism over human hearts still is. Nationalism's
only chance of stopping the march of technology would be to make a holocaust
of the human race, and in that case nationalism itself, as well as technology,
would be consumed in the burning fiery furnace.

The present essay is a general introduction to the theme of this book.
Some of the more important aspects of the impact of the Bolshevik Revolution
on the world during the first half century after 1917 are discussed in
the following essays in detail.

{p. 27} Professor Seton-Watson deals with the political effects of communism
on nationalism and imperialism, both inside the Soviet Union and in the
rest of the world.

Communism, Professor Seton-Watson points out, has proclaimed itself
to be the champion of national self-determination, and, in the Soviet Union,
the component nationalities have, in theory, the right to secede. Actually,
on the other hand, the Soviet Union has firmly held together the former
Tsarist colonial empire. This is, indeed, the one great colonial empire
that is still substantially intact. Is the maintenance of the former Russian
Empire in the form of the Soviet Union going to be permanent? Or is this
empire, too, going to dissolve, as so many former colonial empires have
dissolved - partly through the action of communism - within the last half
century?

Mr Mclnnes deals with the effects, on the socialist and labour movement
outside the Soviet Union, of the Bolsheviks' capture of the Russian State.
He is chiefly concerned with the effects in western countries. He points
out that Russia has produced a special Russian type of revolutionary leader
and a special Russian conception of the meaning of revolutionary orthodoxy.
It is indeed true that the historical figure of Lenin was foreshadowed
in Turgenev's imaginary picture of Bazarov in Fathers and Sons,
while both the self-appointed leader and his despotic method of organization
are prefigured by Dostoevsky in The Possessed. The leader is not
a democratically commissioned representative of the oppressed masses whose
wrongs he has set out to redress. He has commissioned himself, and the
first and last duty of the rank and file is obedience to him. Orthodoxy
means faithfully following the party line along whatever twists and turns
it may be given. Nominally the line is determined, from moment to moment,
by a majority of the party itself. Actually, it is determined by a small
directing inner ring. The essence of orthodoxy is that, however the line
may have been determined, it must be followed blindly. In the figure of
the leader we may see a descendant of serf-owning Russian nobles who has
changed his creed without having changed his behaviour. He expects from
his political henchmen the subservience that his forefathers exacted from
their serfs. As for the Russian communist conception of orthodoxy,
it is reminiscent of the classical Christian conception of it. In
the successive church councils that shaped Christian orthodoxy in the course
of the fourth and fifth centuries, the shape underwent repeated changes
that were nominally approved, on each occasion, by a majority of

{p. 28} the fathers, but were usually imposed, in truth, by
some domineering minority. Here, too, unquestioning obedience was
demanded for each successive decision, however this might have been
reached. The vein of authoritarianism in the Christian tradition had not
been eroded in the Eastern Orthodox Christian countries by any counterpart
of the revolt against the passive acceptance of authority that had begun
to assert itself in the West before the close of the seventeenth century.
A nineteenth-century Russian revolutionary who had rejected the tenets
of Eastern Orthodox Christianity might not have shaken off the Christian
tradition of authoritarianism.

One element that communism inherited from its repudiated Christian
background was the church's belief in its mission to convert the
whole human race. Russian communism is, or at any rate began
by being, a missionary religion. This is the aspect of it with which
Mr McInnes is particularly concerned in his essay. He brings out the point
that the features of Russian communism that were propitious for its victory
in Russia have been handicaps for it abroad, and this especially in western
countries. Moreover, the western industrial workers had been so successful
in gaining an ever increasing share in the amenities of the bourgeois way
of life that it had become inconceivable that they would turn back from
the revisionist policy that had paid these dividends to a revolutionary
policy that would now have jeopardized the workers' own economic and social
gains in attacking the bourgeois regime. In fact, the western workers had
become bourgeois-minded, whereas in Russia the bourgeois way of life had
never gained a firm foothold.

Mr McInnes shows that the main effect of communism on western socialist
and labour parties has been to sabotage their left wings and to drive their
right wings farther and quicker towards the goal of absorption into bourgeois
society - a goal towards which they were already moving and would no doubt
have continued to move in any case, even if the advent of communism had
not given them an additional push in this direction.

Would it be an exaggeration to say that, in the West, the ultimate effect
of the impact of communism has been to make it doubly sure that the future
of the West will be a bourgeois one?

Professor Richard Lowenthal analyses the nature and structure of the
communist regime in the Soviet Union, and goes on to consider how far this
has been taken as a model elsewhere.

He points out that the word 'Soviet', which is part of the official

{p. 29} title of the country and of each of its constituent republics,
does not correspond to the actual political facts. 'Soviet' means an elected
committee, whereas in reality the Soviet government is not amenable to
any elected body; it is a totalitarian single-party regime. The party's
fiat is, indeed, not merely above the law; it is the law.

The totalitarian system of government was improvised by Lenin in
the course of his seizure of power and was a necessary means to this
end. He did not create the system out of nothing; he found it ready to
hand (to a Russian hand, that is) in the nineteenth-century Russian revolutionary
tradition. The nineteenth-century Russian revolutionaries had professed
to be carrying out the will of the people, but in truth they had been,
not the people's representatives, but self-appointed leaders who imposed
their own will on their rank and file. Lenin was familiar with this tradition,
and he followed it.

What is remarkable, and unusual, about Lenin's totalitarian regime is
its success in surviving. It survived the defeat of the counter-revolutionaries
in the Civil War; it survived the New Economic Policy. It succeeded in
harnessing the Russian people's economic energies to purposes that were
not the people's own, and it was thus able - at a high cost to Russia -
to give the Russian economy and society an abiding twist in the direction
of the Bolshevik ideology. Lenin and his companions were not visionaries,
however. One of the reasons for their success was that they invariably
sacrificed their ideology whenever this was proving an obstacle to their
retaining their power and making headway with the process of modernization.
They did succeed in creating a distinctively Russian new form of government.
It was new in the sense that it demonstrated the capacity of ruthless government
to drive a coach and horses through social 'laws' that had been thought,
by Marx and by the liberals alike, to be immutable by man. The one thing
that the Russian communist totalitarian regime has failed to do has been
to achieve its professed, and never repudiated, objective of giving power
to the proletariat and establishing an egalitarian society.

The Russian-ness of Lenin's communist totalitarianism made the fortune
of this form of government in its, and Lenin's, own country. But its strong
point at home in Russia has proved to be its weak point in western countries.
The arbitrariness of this system of government has made it hard to swallow
for western communists, who have been brought up, like other westerners,
in the western, not the

{p. 30} Russian, tradition. The Russian model has, in fact, been virtually
abandoned by the French and Italian Communist Parties, which are the only
two in the West that have come to play an important part in the national
life of their respective countries.

On the other hand, totalitarianism of the Russian type has been seized
upon, as the very tool that they needed for their purpose, by leaders
of revolutionary movements in non-western countries whose objective
was to modernize their peoples' lives on capitalist, not on communist,
lines. Professor Lowenthal takes Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's political career
as a classical example of this. Ataturk suppressed the Turkish communists,
but at the same time he followed in Lenin's footsteps in his progressive
imposition on Turkey of a totalitarian one-party regime. Mr Lowenthal points
out, however, that this non-communist one-party regime in Turkey did not
have the staying-power that its communist prototype in Russia has had.
Opposition parties were allowed to revive in 1946, and in 1950 the party
that had previously held the monopoly of power allowed itself to be put
out of office by the verdict of a general election - a concession to liberalism
that, in the Soviet Union, was still out of the question on the fiftieth
anniversary of the revolution of 1917.

Professor Peter Wiles discusses the Soviet impact on economic policy
in non-communist countries. His field is large, and, in each national compartment
of it, he goes into illuminating detail. It would be superfluous to try
to give a resume of this in the present introductory essay. Mr Wiles's
general conclusion is that the non-communist governments and classes and
peoples that have reacted, on the economic plane, to the Soviet impact
have, in most cases, had no more than a vague idea of what the Soviet communist
doctrines, objectives, and achievements really are. What they have been
reacting to is an enigmatic new menacing presence in the world which might
bear down upon them, with possibly dire consequences for them, if they
did not forestall this danger by moving of their own accord in the direction
in which their pursuer would drive them if they were ever to allow him
to overtake them.

I have just called Soviet communism a 'new' menacing presence, but it
might be more accurate to say that, for Jews, Christians, and Moslems,
this is a familiar presence that has merely assumed a new dress. In the
world of the Judaic religions, has not Soviet communism been playing
the traditional role of the Devil, alias Satan or Iblis? The Devil's
traditional service to human beings has been to

{p. 31} scare them into doing things that they ought to do rather more
quickly than they might have been willing to move if they had not observed
that the Devil is on their tracks. If communism is performing this service
for the non-communist world, we may presume that capitalism is performing
it for communists. This reciprocal service as substitutes for the traditional
devil is one of the rare useful functions of the two antithetical ideologies.
In an age in which the historic religions are losing their former hold
on human consciences, a convincing replacement of a no longer convincing
devil may be one of the necessities of social life.

I cannot close this introductory chapter without expressing, on my fellow
contributors' part, as well as on my own, our gratitude to Mrs Jane Degras,
who has been most generous in bringing her expert knowledge to bear on
the subjects with which this book, as a whole, is concerned, and who edited
and prepared it for the press.

{end of quotes}

Despite Toynbee's disparaging of Communism's fake democracy, he himself
belonged to the secret society set up by Cecil Rhodes for promoting the
British Empire (now the Anglo-American Empire). Its branches, the Round
Table and Council On Foreign Relations, are elites engaged in agenda-setting
and the seeding of public opinion - according to one of the insiders, Carroll
Quigley: quigley.html.

Toynbee on the formation of Judaism, and on World Government: toynbee.html.

The differences between Karl Popper and Arnold Toynbee over the interpretation
of Karl Marx's philosophy. Should Karl Marx be viewed as a social scientist,
or as the prophet of a religion? Did the Totaliarianism of the Soviet Union
derive from Plato's Republic, or from Judaism? popper-vs-toynbee.html.

Some other writers on civilizations are Fernand Braudel (braudel.html),
Oswald Spengler (worst.html), and Samuel Huntington,
the leading "civilizational" thinker of the Round Table / CFR
group today.

Huntington's book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of
World Order draws heavily on the ideas of Toynbee and Carroll Quigley:
huntington.html.